October 31, 2002:

Just an update to my entry of October 19, 2002:
I began my participation in Amazon's Marketplace program on October 1.
One month in, and I find that I've sold a hair under $700 in books. That's
pretty significant, even if it's a one-time thing for me. (Many of the
books were excess author copies of Assembly Language Step By Step
or discard books rescued from the old Visual Developer Magazine
library.) Amazon has fulfilled its stated participation to the letter,
and deposited precisely what they owed me into my account precisely when
they said they'd deposit it

About a third of what I listed sold this first month. The listings are
good for 60 days, at which time they expire. (I can re-list expired books
immediately if I choose to, which I don't think I will.) All but two books
that sold were computer books, even though I listed a fairly broad spectrum
of topics, from SF to religion to Jungian analysis.

My one serious frustration with the system is that it isn't always possible
to list a book that does not have an ISBN, which means, in effect, that
listing books older than 1970 (when ISBNs first became common) is a crapshoot.
If an older book doesn't come up in a title or author search, you can't
list it. I have several relatively rare Lakeside Press editions of 19th
century history titles, but they were published in the 1940s and don't
come up in Amazon's lookup. Even non-rare out-of-print books from the
early 1960s (like Robert Payne's The Canal Builders) don't come
up and thus can't be listed. Only the commonest Tom Swift, Jr books are
listed, and the ones I'd want to sell would be the later, rarer ones.

Maybe that's the tradeoff. The system works because it's totally automated,
and to be totally automated it needs to rely on the ISBN catalog. Bummeron
the other hand, $700 isn't bad for a month's trolling. Amazon will do well
with this system, and if you have stacks of uncommon but unwanted books
around, it might be worth a shot.

October 29, 2002:

Carol and I have been fighting almost constant
migraines recently, which is peculiar in that I almost never get migraines,
and in recent days I've fought off quite a few, and it's slowed me down
a lot. The culprit appears to be certain boxed stuffing and food coating
mixes. We had a supply of these in the cupboard and decided to use them
to get rid of them, and that's when the headaches started. The collection
included "Shake and Bake" and some of their competitors, and
some "chicken helper" kits that give you a stuffing bed to lay
chicken breasts on, plus a sauce to go over them. Once we noticed the
pattern, we tossed the unused stuff and the headaches vanished almost
overnight.

So what's in them that would trigger migraines in someone like me who
has no history? Not sure. We think possibly MSG, though I've eaten a lot
of MSG in my life and it's not done this to me in the past. MSG plus some
spice, perhaps, or maybe some preservative. There seems to be nothing
common among all the products except MSG.

Maybe food sensitivites increase with the onset of middle age. I wish I
knew. One thing I can tell you, we're going back to plain, ordinary, even
kosher meats, with a minimum of chemical additions and corrections. Shake
and Bake is history. (We may try Corn Flakes crumbs as a replacement.) I'll
let you know how it goes.

October 28, 2002:

In our efforts to reduce our sugar consumption,
Carol and I have tried (and use) a number of artificial sweeteners, including
stevia, aspartame (Equal), and sucralose (Splenda). Carol read in one
of her nutrition books that sucralose is the left-handed enantiomorphic
twin of sucrose, otherwise identical to sucrose except that the body doesn't
metabolize it. The other day I stumbled across this
site indicating that what we thought we knew about sucralose was wrong:
It's not the mirror image of sucrose, but a chemical hack that replaces
certain molecular groups with chlorine-based groups. Furthermore, it's
not clear that it's as benign a chemical as its makers would have us believe.

As Dr. Mercola points out in his essay, very little testing (and no long-term
testing at all) has been done on sucralose. So what do we believe? Saccharin
was banned on the basis of tests on rats in which the rats ingested an
almost unthinkable amount of the stuff, not the dribble in Kool-Aid that
was what most of us experienced back in the Sixties.

On the other hand (and there's always an other hand) not everybody thinks
Dr. Mercola is a sound follower of objective scientific method. See Kuro5hin's
take on him.

Again, what do we believe, and on what basis? That sugar is killing a
lot of us is clear. Perhaps we're trading one risk for another here, though
they're different kinds of risks. I'm trying to lose my taste for sugar
entirely, and it's a problem: Although I'm certain I use less than almost
anyone I know, I would be hard pressed to dump the stuff completely.

It's enough to make you nuts.

October 27, 2002:

When I was (as best I recall) in seventh grade,
a friend of mine built a radio receiver based on a magazine article in
either Popular Electronics or Electronics Illustrated. The
radio was an aviation band (108-136 Mhz) AM receiver, and very simple:
A one-tube superregen using one of those wondefully weird 12V B+ space
charge tubes created for car radios in the late 50s to obviate the need
for vibrators. (I'll forgive all you young'uns for not following any of
this.)

That's all the hard facts I can provide, but I've been looking for that
circuit for a long time, and if any of my more..er..mature readers
have stacks of old magazines in the basement, maybe you can find it for
me. The time frame would have been 1963 to 1966, though there's always
the chance he had an older magazine lying around. I'm gathering likely
circuits for a book I hope to write eventually called Junkbox Radio,
and what few people understand is that a superregenerative receiver tuning
89-107 MHz can be made to receive broadcast FM by slope detection on the
detector's skirts. I want to include a 1-tube radio, but not your conventional,
AM band 1-tube radio. This would be terrific...if I can only find the
circuit or something like it. I tried to get a space charge pentode to
superregenerate a couple of years ago and failed. Space charge tubes are
supremely odd things and little has been written about them. They were
the rage for about four years tops, and then fell off the edge of the
technological world.

So...any clues?

October 26, 2002:

I've been watching Fox's Firefly pretty
consistently, and so far I'm happy with it. (Egad! Jeff is watching TV
on a regular basis! The Eschaton may be upon us!) No, the Eschaton is
not upon us, but SF is in a bad way these days and it may be the best
I can do.

Firefly's creator, Joss Whedon, was quoted in an
interview as believing that we are alone in the universe, and that
there are no aliens. So he breaks with the Trek tradition of ubiquitous
humanoids (but nothing freakier, like scorpionoids or intelligent blobs)
and with another longstanding SF tradition as well: No ray guns.
Eek! What's next? Zero-point energy? I wouldn't be surprised, as it's
far from clear what Serenity burns to get itself around the galaxy.

But the ray gun thing is interesting, as I concur. Hand-held rayguns
are hard. The problem is first of all energy storage, but also a problem
of energy focus. Chemical energy is marvelously compact, and can
be released very quickly, and using mechanical confinement (i.e., a gun
barrel) can be transferred to a small, dense projectile with enough efficiency
to be dangerous. Generating a continuous beam with enough energy to do
the damage of a lead slug takes a lot more energy overall. The slug is
focused to an extent far beyond what you can do with a beam. Pulses are
better, but we're not very good at generating pulsed radiative energy
with that sort of instantaneous power, especially from a small package.
My guess is that beam weapons will be biggish things carried by even bigger
things (tanks, planes, ships.) Weapons carried by humans will be projectile-based
for a long time to come.

The Firefly writers misunderstood something crucial in an episode
a couple of weeks ago, when the plot called for the use of a conventional
machine gun in space. The characters thought that the gun had to be in
atmosphere to fire, but that's not so: Gunpowder carries its own oxidizer
with it as part of the mix. It has to; there's no way you could release
an explosive's energy quickly enough drawing oxygen from the air. In the
show they put the gun inside a spare spacesuit and then shot it right
through the helmet faceplate, which must have seemed dramatic to them
but was kind of a howler to me. At least, when they show action in the
void, it's silent. No whoosh! as the ships go past, and no boom!
when things blow up. Considering that this is TV, well, one out of two
ain't bad.

And does anybody else think that Jewel Staite is the most beautiful woman
to work in TV since, well, ever?

October 25, 2002:

I
bought something that most of you may already have, but I'm quite impressed:
Zone
Alarm Pro 3, a personal firewall utility that will replace Black Ice
Defender on my system here. Black Ice works, but it's older and progress
has simply passed it by. Zone Alarm has a lot more tricks up its sleeve.
It's been very good at suppressing pop-up ads and those weird things I'm
starting to see on major sites like Yahoo, most recently a Halloween witch
zipping around and occluding the site for the first few seconds I'm there.

Zone Alarm starts out by blocking all access to your system from the
Internet, and also to the Internet, from the insideand then when
software attempts to either get in or get out, it asks you whether to
allow the access. Virtually all direct connections to your system from
outside remain blocked by defaultNapster and Audiogalaxy are no
more, sighand I see no reason to allow them at this point. When
installed apps like Outlook Express or the Agent newsreader attempt to
access the Internet, I can give them permission, which then can be "remembered"
by Zone Alarm, allowing future access without interruption.

This was only a nuisance for the first day I had it installedthe first
few hours, actually. Once Outlook, Agent, Aardmarks, IE, Norton AntiVirus,
and a couple other items had their permission, Zone Alarm retreated into
the background to keep an eye on things. It's hell on spyware, stops pop-up
ads cold, and can cooperate usefully with the NAT firewall inside my Linksys
residential gateway. I'm still exploring what all it can do, but it's worth
the price of admission for suppressing the pop-ups alone. Highly recommended.

October 24, 2002:

In poking around in showrooms browsing various
house fixtures for our new house in Colorado Springs, Carol and I came
across something that definitely belongs in the Guldurndest Things file:
Fire on Ice, which is a species
of gas fireplace in which pale disembodied flames dance above a pile of
broken glass. That sounds bad, except that the glass pieces aren't pointed
shards like what comes of a broken window, but more those little cubes
of glass that you find scattered around the road after a car accidentwell,
ok, maybe it sounds bad anyway.

It's certainly spooky looking, andweirdly enoughcold,
in the mythic sort of way that echoes the feeling I get for most ultramodern/postmodern
design. There's no sense of coziness like you get from gas logs or certainly
a real wood flame. It just looks wrong, like something that belongs
in a Harry Potter movie.

Carol I did wood heat to death back in Rochester 20 years ago, and we're
not going there again. In the winter (which was most of the time in Rochester)
you couldn't hardly breathe outside after dark, once everybody in the neighborhood
fired up all those "clean" and environmentally benign wood stoves.
We've done quite well without a fireplace here in Scottsdale (duhh!) but
irrespective of what we think, fireplaces are just expected in Colorado.
So we'll go with natural gas and a stack of good, clean, highly artificial
ceramic logs. No ashes. No soot. No chimney fires. Hey, Grizzly Adams I'm
not!

October 23, 2002:

Apart from hockey, I find very few human concepts
as utterly inane as reincarnation. Supposedly we are repeatedly dipped
in and out of physical reality like teabags, in the hope of picking up
enough, well, something (Wisdom? College degrees? Scars?) to merit
the prize of personal extinction. Of course, we don't remember anything
of prior incarnations, so it's hard to conceive of just what is doing
the learning, or what is actually learned. But while picking through my
library looking for discards to thin out the collection, I came upon a
passage in Soul Journey by John A. Sanford:

We began our quest for the
origins of the idea of the soul because the idea of reincarnation calls
for an understanding of what it is that transmigrates from one existence
to another. As we have seen, in Indian thought the soul is an impersonal
reality, more metaphysical than psychological. What transmigrates from
one existence to another is the seeming-soul, the jiva, which is not
an entity of enduring consequence. For an idea of the soul as an individual
entity with enduring life and value we had to turn to the idea of the
soul as it developed among the Greeks and matured in Christian thought.
But the chances are that, with the exception of a few sophisticated
people, most modern believers in reincarnation, while they derive their
ideas about reincarnation from the East, have in mind a Western idea
of the soul. The amount of interest among contemporary Western people
who believe in reincarnation suggests this, since for the East the past
lives of the seeming-self, the jiva, are of little importance. Thus
what we probably have in many cases in the West today is a marriage,
as it were, of the Eastern ideas of God as Brahman to a Western idea
of the soul. But such a marriage is no marriage at all since the idea
of the individuality of the soul, as we have seen, is foreign to the
East.

In other words, from the Eastern standpoint, it isn't an individual soul
that reincarnates. What really matters in reincarnation is that the raw
stuff of personhood is gradually improved over time by passage through
the physical, until it is pure enough to need no further processing. This
raw stuff, however, is not in any sense an individual. Reincarnation
is like a gradual process of removing the impurities from precious metal.
There's no sense in which personality or memories or anything specific
to individual life persists beyond death. The mental ingredients of a
newly dead person are poured back into the crucible from which new lives
are drawn, but the individual experience of the old lifethe process
by which that particular incarnation improved the stuff of personhoodhaving
served its purpose, is gone.

I don't agree with that, of course, but it's not inane, like all this talk
of "I was a 14th century British nobleman in my last incarnation."
The survival of the individual soul, with memories and personality intact,
implies an individual destinynot just being melted down and
poured into a new mold to become a new individual made of slightly better
stuff. Philosopher John Hick has an interesting and original take on this,
which I'll relate here once I find his book and freshen up the concept in
my mind.

October 22, 2002:

I've
been fascinated by small-format PCs for quite a few years, and have watched
them closely as they've evolved. (Ever hear my wonderful story about a
certain Taiwanese "Bible-Size Computer!" that I saw at Comdex
circa 1991? Dare I tell the story here?) You may have seen my entry for
November 12, 2001, in which I mentioned the Cappuccino
PC in all its various private-label identities. A couple of weeks
ago I decided to buy one. It's private-labeled as "EZGo" but
it's Cappuccino all the way. I need a Windows XP lab system here, and
a Linux system as well, even though I intend to continue using my Win2K
Dell as my primary workstation. Windows XP has a lot of new support for
Wi-Fi, which I have to understand well enough to explain it to others
in my book.

So here it is. The thing is tiny, not even "Bible-sized" unless
you have a real small Bible. It's defined primarily by the size
of the CD-RW/DVD ROM drive built-in. What I find impressive is that the
thing is veritably crusty with I/O. The front panel has two USB ports,
an IrDA port (not that anybody cares) plus headphones and mic jacks.

And on the back panel, egad. In addition to video, keyboard, and mouse
connectors, there are two USB-2.0 ports (480 Mbps!) a 100-Base T Ethernet
RJ45, and right beside that a gigabit Ethernet RJ45. How useful
that will be I don't know, as I have nothing else in the house to connect
it to. There are two FireWire ports, a conventional serial and parallel
port, a 56K dialup modem RJ11, plus S-Video, AV-Video, and an SPDIF audio
port, whateverthehell that is.

As if that weren't enough, the unit has a single Class 2 PCMCIA slot
on the top or left side, depending on how you stand it. That thing protruding
from the top is a Cisco 340 Wi-Fi client card, plugged in as much to keep
the dust out of the slot as anything else. (They didn't include any sort
of plug for the PCMCIA slot, and Arizona is famous for its dust.)

You can set it down flat, or stand it up on edge with two little folding
feet. Given that it's running at 1.8 GHz (the same speed as my monster
Dell) the internal fan is not surprising, and its white-noise quality
is easily tuned out.

The downside to units like this became apparent when I tried to install
Red Hat 8. Red Hat attempted to identify the video logic and failed, as
nothing more elaborate than 800 X 600 standard VGA will function. What
little doc came with the unit sheds no light on what sort of graphics
chip set it uses, and I suspect I'll have to call the dealer to see what
sorts of drivers Linux will require.

On the other hand, it almost disappears on my overcrowded computer table,
and now that I have my KVM switch reinstalled, I can pop between the two
machines with one jab of a button. In case you're interested, it came from
IBuyPower.com.
With some reservations (and given that I've had it running for about 24
hours so far) I do recommend it.

October 21, 2002:

I
got a "Where's George?"
dollar in change up at Albertson's on Saturday. The URL was right there
on the back of the bill, rubber stamped in black ink three times in the
margins. I'd heard of this marvelously whacky Web site before, but never
actually went there. This provided an irresistable opportunity.

The whole idea behind "Where's George?" is to use the Web to
track the wanderings of paper money. You type in the serial number and
series year of a piece of currency (it doesn't have to be a dollar) and
indicate on the bill somehow that it's been recorded. My guess is that
the guy who turned this one loose is really into the concept, as he made
up a rubber stamp just for the purpose. (The site does not sell such stamps,
which are apparently a little dicey from a legal standpoint.) Most people
just use a pen or felt marker. If you get a "Where's George?"
bill in change, you can go up to the Web site and record it, along with
where you got it and what shape it's in. You can also pull down a complete
history of the bill's travels since "Where's George?" recruited
it.

There is also a "Where's Willy?"
site for Canadian currency. "Willy" is Sir Wilfrid Laurier,
who was the first French Canadian prime minister, and his picture is on
the Canadian $5 bill. (There is no longer a $1 bill in Canada.) You can
buy a "Where's Willy?" stamp from the site, since it's apparently
legal to deface Canadian money.

My bill was a relative newbie. The only other record was that of its recruiter,
64 days ago in Glendale, Arizona, which is the suburb on the other side
of Phoenix from Scottsdale, and about 25 miles west of here. I recorded
it, added my comments, and will spend it at the next opportunity. If the
bill is ever recorded again, I will get an email telling me to come and
see where it's been. Good silly fun, of a sort that none of us would ever
have predicted twenty years ago. O Brave New World, That Has Such Diversions
In It!

October 20, 2002:

After having written over 20,000 words on The
Other Catholic Church: A Seeker's Guide to the Old Catholic Movement,
I had second thoughts and set it aside. I haven't changed my mind about
the Old Catholic idea. I still think it's the best spiritual path for
people who want to remain Catholic but can't in conscience (for any of
several reasons) support the Roman Catholic Church.

No. I stopped writing the book because I didn't want to get people's
hopes up in vain. I've mentioned the Old Catholic Church here many times,
and people regularly drop me notes asking me where they can sign up. (The
photo of Rev. Mary Ramsden presiding at our 25th wedding anniversary Mass
in my entry for January 22, 2002 brought several such inquiries.) The
kicker is that actual Old Catholic communities are very sparsely distributed,
and if you're lucky enough to live within striking distance of one, that's
goodbut most people are not. So rather than get people all excited
and then dash their hopes, I canned the project.

My new thought on Old Catholicism is simpler, but not as easy: Start
your own Old Catholic home church. I mean it! Every so often, Mary
Ramsden celebrates the Mass around my sister Gretchen's dining room table,
and when we're in town we're always there. Mary's a validly ordained priest
in the Old Catholic tradition. She has her own vestments, chalice, paten,
and antimension.
Gretchen invites her estranged Catholic friends, and for an hour or two
the divisions in the Catholic world sort of melt away, and we become
Church, as Christ Himself told us we would.

What you mainly need is the will to make it happen, and a priest. The
will I leave up to you. There are ways to find a priest. I think the organization's
name is appalling, but Rent-a-Priest
exists to refer Roman Catholic priests who have left the Roman Catholic
organization (usually to marry) to people who need their services, for
masses, weddings, baptisms, and so on. You can also search on "Old
Catholic" for Old Catholic priests and communities in your area.
I made up a nice laser printable missal in Word 2000 for Mary's masses,
and anyone who wants the file can have it.

It basically comes down to this: God is there for everyone, but you have
to go after Him. Sometimes this means creating your own community. Catholics
are used to treating their parishes as a given, but believe me: There is
something ineffably marvelous about sharing the Eucharist as the very first
Christians shared it, around a community table. It changed the whole meaning
of Catholicism for me. If that's a path that appeals to you, give it some
thought. It's easier than you think.

October 19, 2002:

There was a fuss some months ago when Amazon
implemented a new program called Amazon marketplace, which basically allowed
people to sell their used books on the Amazon system, with Amazon getting
a rakeoff on each sale. This sounds tame enoughthe fuss happened
because Amazon places a link underneath a new book's main listing reading,
"Used and new from $XX.XX."

Those making the fuss were mostly authors, who objected to Amazon steering
people away from new book sales. I could see both sides back then, and
even moreso now that I've been in the Amazon Marketplace program for three
weeks, selling odd books as an experiment. Basically, on October 1 I listed
30 books culled from my library that I was planning on getting rid of
anyway. Many were Eighties books on things like Smalltalk 80, which I
was bullish on back then. A few were more recent works, like Bertrand
Meyer's original Eiffel book, and some other odd lots I saved from the
Coriolis library when the company went down and decided since not to keep.
I also listed one of my own Assembly Language Step By Step copies
to see if anyone would bite.

They bit. Boy, did they bite! In 16 days I sold 14 books. Five of those
14 were copies of my own book. (I got a case of 25 free copies back in
2000, and don't really need to keep that many around, especially since
I've begun thinking about the next revision.) As soon as one copy sold,
I listed another one. I sold two copies on the same day once.

I think it worked as well as it did because I checked each book before
listing it to see what other people were charging for the same book. Most
used computer books were going for $6-$10, indicating that they were remainders
that the sellers (which were almost always independent bookstores) probably
bought for a buck or two apiece. Anything I saw in that price range, I
passed. For those books selling at a decent price, I undercut the lowest
price by $5 and listed it. Worked like a charm. I've cleared almost $400
since October 1.

This isn't a long-term thing for me. My supply of books is limited, and
I have better things to do with my time than schlep down to the Post Office
every couple of days. On the other hand, I have a suggestion to silence
the authors who hate the system: Have Amazon create a special link for interested
authors, reading "Buy a signed copy from the author for $XX.XX!"
Authors typically can get case quantities of their own books for 50% off
cover, and selling at a discount would net much more per book than your
current stingy 10% net royalty, which usually amounts to $1.50 per copy.
Everybody would win that way: Amazon, authors, and fans who for whatever
reason value author autographs. (It's neither a win nor a loss for publishersor
who knows? Anything to move more books, right?) I'm going to suggest it
to Amazon, and I'll report on their reaction here.

October 18, 2002:

I discovered a problem yesterday that I've never
seen discussed anywhere, but it must bedevil non-technical people who
encounter it. If you're non-technical, glaze over nowI don't have
time to explain it in detail right now. But here it is: I bought a D-Link
Wi-Fi access point (DWL-900AP+) and for testing purposes connected it
to my spare Linksys BEFSR41 router/switch. The D-Link appeared to be dead.
I could not bring up the internally served HTTP configuration screen.
I scratched my head, and in reviewing possible problems noticed that the
two devices were not in the same subnet. In other words, the Linksys config
screen was at 192.168.1.1 and the D-Link was at 192.168.0.50. If you plug
the D-Link into the Linksys, the Linksys won't find the D-Link. Won't
Web, won't ping, won't anything.

The fix is simple: I loaded the Linksys router/switch config screen and
changed its address to 192.168.0.1. Bingo! Everything's copacetic. (Does
anybody still say "copacetic"? Or even remember what it means?)
Neither the Linksys nor the D-Link documentation (if you can call it documentation)
even hints at this possibility, although D-Link suggests that its products
work best with other D-Link products, heh. Worse, the D-Link unit does
not have a way to change its IP address. If you were using a router with
a fixed configuration IP, you'd be hosed short of changing the subnet
mask, which has other effects, most of them un-good.

A pure edges problem, as people who may recall my famous "edges"
editorial in VDM years back will understand. Nobody's in charge of the edges.
I've seen this more in my Wi-Fi research than anywhere else in all computing.
There's a lot of Linksys BEFSR41's out there. I'll bet D-Link gets
pallet loads of perfectly good DWL-900AP's back as "dead." Am
I wrongor am I just missing some easy and obvious fix for this?

October 17, 2002:

Haven't
been feeling well. Nothing serious, but what (little) energy I've been able
to summon is going into the book the last few days. Bear with me.

October 15, 2002:

As I've written here before (see my entry for
December 15, 2000) I'm not much for hard liquor, except perhaps in weak
margueritas and cordials to pour over ice cream. Still trueand there's
a new item to report on the ice cream front.

But to tell you that story I have to tell you this one. We stumbled on
a Haagen Dazs "special edition" flavor called Coffee Toffee
Crunch (basically coffee ice cream with pieces of Heath Bar in it) last
year, bought the two cartons they had at Safeway, and went back for more
only to find that there was a new special edition in its slot. (Bananas
Foster? Something idiotic like that. Bananas do not belong in ice
cream!) Needless to say, no matter how hard we looked, we never found
Coffee Toffee Crunch again.

Fast forward a year, to a glorious day in August when Jeff stumbles across
Starbuck's Java Toffee Crunch ice cream at Fry's, and it's pretty much
the same thing. And although I can't abide Starbuck's coffee, they make
mighty fine ice cream. Well, as you might expect, we ate what they had
at Fry's, and went back to find Starbuck's Low Fat Latte in its place.
Java Toffee Crunch has not been seen hereabouts since then.

So last week,
while I was chasing down the booze aisle at Safeway to see if there were
any new zinfandels in the wine section, a garish new bottle caught my
eye: Dooley's Toffee Liqueur. Hey, what the hell...it's not chunky but
it's as close as we may be able to come. So now we buy Breyer's Coffee
ice cream and pour Dooley's over it. No, it's not the same, but it's a
good combination nonetheless.

Dooley's is an interesting idea that doesn't quite make it in some respects.
Its toffee flavor is not strong, and even the relatively modest 17% alchohol
kind of overwhelms it. Knocked back straight, it reminds me powerfully of
Bailey's Irish Cream, with a little caramel stirred in, and that's not a
bad thing. It mixes well with coffee, milk, and ice cream, and on the whole
(though it wish it tasted a little more like Heath bars) it's a win. I'm
still hoping for a return of one brand of coffee-ice-cream-plus-heath-bars
someday, but in the meantime, Dooley's'll do.

October 14, 2002:

For the last week or so, our friendly bobcat
has been back, poking around the house (see my entries for May 20, 2001
and July 1, 2001) drinking from the water bowl we leave under a dripper
for the local birds and animals, and (as best we can tell) spending the
night up on the porch roof right outside my office window.

Very cool to have a "pet" bobcat, right? Well, it can be a
mixed blessing. This morning we found a (mostly) eaten desert cottontail
inside our walled courtyard, under the leaning driftwood where the bobcat
has been seen hanging out more than once. Everybody loves watching animals,
but watching National Geographic specials on TV spares you the
unpleasant business of picking up their leftover blood and guts.

Carol and I are torn about this. In this awful season of heat and drought
(the worst summer on record here in Phoenix) we're in the habit of sharing
vegetable scraps with the bunnies, but the bunnies are getting rather used
to the favor. They're almost impatient sometimes; they run right over when
we go out to the clay bowl where we put the goodies, and one has been in
the habit of coming over and sniffing at my shoes. We can't help but think
that our recent mess in the courtyard was one of our "friendly"
bunnies, who have gotten a little too fat and trusting to outrun a "friendly"
bobcat. We know that if we stop feeding them, most will probably die. There's
really nothing to eat out there right now. If we keep feeding them, they'll
make more bunnies, and...you know how it is, messing with biological systems.
As with many things, there are no answers. We're still trying to figure
out what the balanced mode of action might be.

October 13, 2002:

I'm avoiding TV more than I ordinarily do (though
mercifully, there's nothing much on but baseball these days) because of
the hateful blizzard of attack ads mounted to slander one candidate or
initiative or another, in preparation for the November election here.
Every one I've seen either omits crucial facts, tells lies, or distorts
the truth beyond recognition, and I'm sure this is what depresses voter
turnout.

Here in Arizona, one very big deal is Indian gambling. There are three
competing initiatives on the slate to govern Indian gambling, including
one fronted by the local race track operators, whose lunches the Indians
have been eating for years. I'm all in favor of letting Indians have casinosit's
virtually the only thing that has ever improved their lives here. And
most interesting to me are the shreiking shrill complaints from various
groups about how immoral gambling is, and how all gambling should be illegal,
Indian, race track, and otherwise.

It's unclear to me that glambling is a physical addiction, as with tobacco
or certain drugs. I suppose people can be addicted to gambling the way
they're addicted to video games, and I've read that people are addicted
to a lot of other completely legal activities that most people engage
in without damage or undue attachment. I myself may be addicted to reading,
heaven forbidand writing, guilty! What we may be seeing here is
not an addiction, but a failure to strive for and achieve balance in one's
personal life. There are a lot of ways that that can go wrong. Gambling
is simply another one.

Weirdest of all the reasons given to outlaw gambling is the one that
insists that we should be teaching the poor to work hard, save, and invest,
not to take a chance on getting something for nothing. In America we get
rich by working hard, not by buying lottery tickets.

What a crock. Your typical store clerk or other unskilled worker has
zero chance of getting rich or even comfortable by "working
hard, saving, and investing," especially with interest rates asymptotically
approaching zero. Starting a business and working hard is also a gamble.
Every so often somebody gets lucky, but most business startups run on
the edge for awhile and then tank and die. Perhaps one entrepreneur in
ten thousand can sell out and get rich. The rest lose everything. Hey,
does that sound like a lottery or what? At least with Lotto you don't
have to pour your life savings and ten years of your life into the pot
before you understand that you've lost the wager.

Apart from the occasional fluky jury award (and the lawyers get most of
that) the only way poor people can get rich is by gambling. It's a dream,
and I say, let them have that dream. Dreams are scarce enough these days.
If we do try to teach them anything, let's teach them the value of a balanced
lifewhich is a lesson we should be teaching everyone, from the top
of society to the bottom.

October 12, 2002:

How
did this happen? I was reading yesterday's Wall Street Journal,
and I came upon a mention of a major canivorous mammal which is widespread
in the Eastern United States, that in all my fifty years I have never
seen or heard about. It's called a fisher, and it's a big mustelidbasically
a fifteen-pound weasel. Although it was once on the edge of extinction,
the broad reforestation of the East has given it new habitat, and it's
come back with a vengeance because it now has a reliable and plentiful
food supply: Stray house cats.

The fisher was previously remarkable as the only really successful predator
of porcupines. (How it accomplishes this feat is ukky enough that I don't
feel like relating it.) Porcupines are still fairly sparse, but feral
house cats are a worsening problem in suburban rings around large cities,
which are now growing into the new hardwood forests existing where marginal
farms stood until the Great Depression. The fishers live in the woods,
and along with coyotes are feasting on stray cats. This is splintering
the environmental/animal rights movement along several lines, as cat lovers
want to wipe out the (protected) fishers, and bird lovers are cheering
the fishers because cats eat a lot of birds. (The fishers can actually
chase cats up trees, while the coyotes have to stand on the ground and
watch.)

I guess the problem is just one of those unexpected consequences of regenerating
"lost" habitatbut what I find astonishing is that I can
be a voracious reader all my life to middle age without ever hearing of
something as big, snarly, and interesting as a fifteen-pound weasel. (That's
heavier than Mr. Byte was!) Talk about keeping a low profile...

October 11, 2002:

I find myself turning to the problem of evil
more and more these days, especially since 9/11. The explanation for evil
I worked out for myself over the years (that we are radically free but
not radically wise) just doesn't seem to explain the sort of pointless,
avid but self-defeating evil we see in things like Naziism, Stalinism,
Pol Pot, and Al Quaidaor even on a smaller scale, with situations
like Columbine that defy reasonable explanation. The evil of things like
Opus Dei (see my entry for October 7, 2002) might be ascribed to a misunderstanding
of the nature of God. I consider Opus Dei, in fact, to be nothing more
than the latest of countless upwellings of the ancient heresy of Manichaeism,
which itself is a gloss on gnostic dualism. Dualism holds that our flawed
creation is unworthy of an infinite and all-good God, and that we're stuck
in a nuthouse created by a finite and evil creator god (the Demiurge)
and run covertly by countless lesser godlings called archons.

Setting aside the theology for now, it's worth a closer look at this
idea of "archons." Jung himself noted that his description of
archetypes residing in a collective unconscious mapped well onto the dualists'
archons living in the unseen realm of the pleroma and causing all the
unpleasantness we experiene here on Earth. The literature of schizophrenia
seems to describe wars going on inside people's skulls, between the beset
human being and one or more persistent but stupid-sounding voices advising
destructive behavior. Psychiatrist Wilson Van Dusen, in his 1974 book
The Presence of Other Worlds, describes his work in which he attempted
to hold conversations with the voices heard by his schizophrenic patients.
That these were other autonomous minds seemed obvious to himbut
where were they located? Were they fragments of the patients' personality
(whatever that means) or were they actually invaders from somewhere
else?

Even people who grant Jung a lot of credibility in describing the human
mind often stop short of accepting the existence of an objective "collective
unconscious" that extends outside of and connects separate human
minds in some sort of unseen whole. That there may be autonomous patterns
abroad in that unseen collective undermind, and that those patterns have
to power to influence, smacks too much of medieval demonology and is written
off without sufficient consideration. But the more I read of psychotic
killers of various stripes, the more I begin to wonder if there is in
fact a sort of tension (let's not be dramatic and call it a war) between
the collective unconscious and the relationships we build out here in
the conscious, physical world. The archetypes abroad in the undermind
pull us toward selfishness, isolation, and chaos, while the connections
of friendship, respect, and mutual dependence we build in our waking world
pull us toward community and wholeness. When people are isolated, abused,
and set apart by others (as happened to the Columbine killers and to many
young men in certain inherently violent cultures like the Bedouin) connections
to our waking world weaken, and the archons start reeling them in. The
archons, because they exist apart from and are not dependent upon any
single mind in the physical world, don't care if they win or lose individuals
or whole nations. Archons may not in fact be minds as we know them; they
may not be self-reflective to any greater degree than a higher animal
like a bear or a dog. That's why self-defeating evil persists: Evil doesn't
care if it wins. It doesn't care if it loses. It's just out there, a lurking
pattern that seeks to draw lonely minds to itself. Eliminate lonliness,
perhaps, and we could make a huge dent in the prevalence of evil.

Out of space for today. More later.

October 10, 2002:

Yesterday morning's Wall Street Journal
carried a piece on how all across the country, symphony orchestras are
running out of money and shutting down. The reporter who wrote the story
proffered every conceivable explanation except for the correct one: Symphony
orchestras have this bad habit of putting on concerts in which they play
absolutely nothing but opaque, self-indulgent crap.

Carol and I had season tickets to the Phoenix Symphony some years ago.
We went to just about every concert all season long (hey, they were paid
for!) and when the season was over, we sort of looked at each other and
said, Well, we're sure not doing that again.

One evening's concert was typical: They had a young woman violin prodigy
named Midori sawing solo on her Stradavarius to some painfully long symphony
by some composer I never heard of. She stood there stage center and sawed
and sawed and sawed, and the sweat was coming off the poor thing's forehead,
and after awhile I just wanted to scream. There was furious energy but
no melody, no harmony, no sense that any great pattern was coming together
to resonate with the great human myths in the collective unconscious.
The musicif you could call it thatwas enormously sophisticated,
and absolutely cold. I gave her points for effort, but the guy who chose
that piece should be taken out and shot, along with the guy who wrote
it.

I will not pay to listen to stuff like that, nor Shoenberg and his atonal
"music" nor modern composers who think they're inventing something
new by having highly-skilled musicians bang on rocks and pipes and make
an incoherent racket while the oh-so sophicated audience nods knowingly
and congratulates themselves on their sophisticated tastes.

We got tossed one bone that seasonBeethoven's Fifthbut not
a single item by the English Romantics, and only an occasional scrap from
Hayden or Mozart that seemed chosen for its tepid qualities, as though
to say, Surely you folks don't want to hear any more of that.

Yup, we sure don't. And we never went back. I will not spend that kind of
money on classical concerts unless and until I'm guaranteed that I will
hear melody, harmony, and rhythm. Yes, I am a Philistinesee this big
P on my T-shirt?and apparently there are a lot of others like me.
Collectively we are boycotting classical music, until classical music comes
to its senses, which may be after classical music as a live art form is
long past extinct.

October 9, 2002:

I guess one shouldn't expect such foresight
from a bunch of electronics guys, but one great big honking hole in the
IEEE 802.11 wireless networking standard is the lack of any kind of software
API. One of the things I'd like to do is write software to control (or
at least poll and sample signal and noise levels) a Wi-Fi client adapter
from a Delphi program. One thought I had is that I could easily mount
a spaghetti sauce can antenna on a Meccano altazimuth mount worked by
a pair of small stepper motors, and then write software that would allow
the antenna to aim itself by scanning in two dimensions while sampling
signal strength.

APIs for Wi-Fi clients exist, obviously, but the kicker is that they are
chipset-dependent, and the functions are all different among the three or
four significant chipsets kicking around the industry. Because they're all
proprietary interfaces, they're mostly undocumented in public places, and
I'm not sure I want to spend the time chasing them down, or the money to
buy a chip foundry's API toolkit. I keep waiting for somebody to create
a component set or function library for even one of the major chipsets (Prism
II would be socko) and when it does I guess I'll just sharpen up my Delphi
component writing skills and make me some software. If you see a Wi-Fi library
of any kind, in any language (evenurrrpFORTH) do let me know.

October 8, 2002:

I've
got just under 60,000 words down on my Wi-Fi book (heading for 90,000)
and it's been wonderful fun. I went out in the garage today and built
the Tin-Can Bandwidth Expander, Mark II. The idea is to mount a 2.4 GHz
waveguide antenna on a gooseneck base, so that it can be aimed at your
access point from the fringes of the access point's coverage area. I have
a rambling and much-extended house, and the path between the livingroom
coffee table and my office here (where the access point lives) is optimal
bad. The signals must pass through the kitchen, with cabinets full of
pots and pans, several walls (including an exterior wall that is now an
interior wall) and a steel spiral staircase. I can barely connect from
within the microwave shadow cast by the kitchen, and the connection I
can achieve usually hangs onto the minimum 1 Mbps data rate by its fingernails.

The antenna is a 3.375" diameter Hunt's 26.5 oz spaghetti sauce
can, drilled to accept a single N connector, into the solder pot of which
is placed 1.22" of #10 copper wire. (That's what a quarter wave whip
cooks down to at microwave!) The base once belonged to a 50's vintage
gooseneck desk lamp that I picked up for $6.95 on eBay. When plugged into
the Orinoco Gold card in my laptop, the signal in the livingroom jumps
to near-normal levels, and I can pull the full 802.11b bit rate of 11
Mbps without any trouble at all.

Mark II is the prettier child of the Mark I prototype, which used a 20-year-old
1-pound coffee can that had been hosting wood screws in the garage since
I lived in Rochester, NY. Coffee cans work just as well, and have a lower
noise level, probably because they have fewer corrugations to scatter the
incoming microwave energy. But the spaghetti sauce can gets the signal where
it needs to go, and that's all I would ask of a junkbox gadget like this.
It will have a starring role in Jeff Duntemann's Drive-By Wi-Fi Guide.
January 2003, Paraglyph Press. Watch for it.

October 7, 2002:

Pope John Paul II yesterday raised Josemaria
Escriva de Balaguer to sainthood, culminating a meteoric rise that many
think suspicious, considering who the old guy was: The founder of Opus
Dei (the Work of God) a secret society promoting reactionary conservative
Catholicism and obedience to the Pope. Opus Dei is highly secretive and
cultic, and although they claim to be nothing more than a society promoting
spiritual purity and sexual probity, people who have left Opus Dei have
made it plain that the society's kingpins quietly attempt to influence
international politics as a way of furthering the reactionary Catholic
position and a brand of Spanish political philosophy so far right as to
reasonably be called "fascist" without exaggeration.

It's interesting to me that Opus Dei is actually V2.0 of a covert Papal
dirty tricks squad. V1.0 (and the archetype for the category) were the
Jesuits, who appeared after the Reformation to "put things back"
to what they had been before cranky Martin Luther upset the medieval Catholic
applecart. The Jesuits were the original "masters of method"
and in some ways make the CIA look like drooling amateurs. They tormented
the independent-minded Dutch Catholics in the 18th century and in doing
so laid the foundation for the Old Catholic Church's coalescence in 1870.
For reasons that are still obscure to me, during the 20th century (and
especially after Vatican II) the Jesuits morphed into a hotbed of liberal
theological teaching and liberal social sensibility, and are now considered
the #1 thorn in the Pope's side. (Rough justice, but justice nonetheless.)
So Pope Pius XI had another go at it, and now we have Opus Dei.

I don't begrudge the Pope his conservative societies, just as I think
Presidents should be able to nominate their own guys to federal courts
irrespective of their politics. What I object to (and my objection borders
on the rabid) is to secrecy within a religious movement. Religion should
have no secrets. Secrets turn a religion into a cult, and cults are
not good things. Though overall they're good people, the Mormons card
you on the way into church, and that's not religionthat's a cult.
There are cultic elements in Roman Catholicism, and even more in Eastern
Orthodoxy. I think the iconostasis is blasphemous, as it implies that
the laity is unworthy to look upon the re-enactment of the Last Supper.
Culticand dead opposed to the whole spirit of Christianity. I would
prefer that religions stay out of politics entirely, but what politicking
is done should be done out in the open. Hey, if you don't like the way
your enemies live their lives, shame them with your goodnessdon't
try to slit their throats in the middle of the night.

In case you'd like to see more, here's the Opus
Dei Web site, and here's an opposing
view. (Forgive the shaky English; that second site is Austrian.) And
still another, focusing on the
brainwashing and intimidation that Opus Dei visits on its unfortunate adherents.
We are definitely heading for a split in Roman Catholicism, and to be honest
with you, I can't wait. Reactionary Catholicism is an extremely scary thing,
and the very best course would be for it to pull back within itself and
let the rest of us get on with pursuing the Catholic idea as Christnot
the Popetaught it.

October 6, 2002:

Carol
read somewhere that when one firstborn marries another firstborn, the marriage
has a much better than average chance of lasting throughout the lives of
the partners. No idea whyand she no longer recalls where it was that
she saw the note. But it's an interesting thing to ponder.

October 5, 2002:

Slashdot aggregated a
link today that made me roar. Out of bravado or reasons obscure (it's
really a stupid thing to do) bookseller WHSmith dared some guy to break
Microsoft's ebook copy protection system, and the guy responded by sending
WHSmith a copy of the ebook in question, completely unprotected. Did he
break Microsoft Reader? Hardly. He wrote a script that used screen-capture
software to create bitmaps of the displayed pages that Microsoft Reader
puts up on the screen. He went on to say that had he wanted a textual
copy, he could have just fed the bitmaps into an OCR utility like FineReader
Pro.

The guy was not a hacker of any stripe. He just knew his Windows and
a little scripting. All he wanted to do was demonstrate the complete futility
of copy protection.

My view? Keep the price low and make it easy to pay for the goods. People
will buy. People will also steal the goods, and when they do, figure it
into your PR budget. Especially today, word-of-mouth seems to be the single
most effective promotional vehicle. Bits are cheapand pirates are
the cheapest PR mechanism ever devised.

October 4, 2002:

Every
so often, I run across something both unexpected and wonderful. The other
day Carol brought home a box of Shamrock Farms Super Size Malt Missiles,
and we had to slap our hands to keep from finishing them all at one sitting.

A Malt Missile is a one-stick popsicle that tastes like a chocolate malt.
Stunningly good. They're made in Phoenix (Shamrock Farms is a local dairy)
which implies that they're one of those underground local cult favorite
things and not available outside the greater metro area. I'd be curious
to know if any of you elsewhere have ever seen them. After what seems like
decades of obscurity, malt seems to be coming back into fashion. Bring it
on!

October 3, 2002:

A
reader who (understandably) asked to remain anonymous recommended an interesting
book: Man-Made
UFOs 1944-1994. I ordered a copy from Amazon and had a lot of
fun with it. It's a less professional but more detailed (and slightly
more paranoid) telling of the tale that Nick Cook told in his book The
Hunt for Zero Point (see my entry for September 16.) The premise is
basically this: sometime during the last part of WWII, the Nazis hit on
something new and powerful that enabled aircraft to fly without propellers
or even jets. They made small, remotely piloted versions, but didn't quite
get a full-sized, man-carrying model into production before the Reich
collapsed in May 1945.

The Americans walked into Germany, piled the whole mess into trucks,
and disappeared over the Atlantic with it. Ever since then, some ultra-black
component of the military has been sitting on the secret as something
too powerful to even hint at, and the scattered UFO sightings have not
been spacecraft owned by aliens, but spycraft owned by the Air Force.
There are no aliens. The idea of aliens was disinformation invented
by the CIA to make the whole idea of flying saucers ridiculous. (Boy,
did that work or what?)

No, I don't buy it, c'mon already. But it pleases me to see somebody
dump on the whole aliens thing, which I loathe. And I'm fascinated by
the idea of zero-point energy welded to an antigravity device, especially
after reading of the research of various parties (especially a
Russian named Podkletnov) into alleged gravitational effects of rapidly
spinning disks of high-temperature superconducting material. Spooky physics
is an ancient interest of mine, and this is spooky in the extreme. Podkletnov's
research isn't beyond skepticism yet, but I'm willing to grant that the
idea should be pursued. And key to what little we know of the Nazi experiments
is that they were spinning circular disks or turbines of exotic materials
very quicklyas fast as 20,000 RPM, which is fast indeed.

October 2, 2002:

Today is our 26th wedding anniversary. 25 was
The Big One, but 26 has been pretty good too. Carol gave me a very simple
card that brought tears to my eyes: A starry, moonlit night, a shooting
star, and the simple phrase: I made a wish...and you came true.
I'm not sure I can add much to that.

Cherish your spouse. Marriage is a ground deeper than you can imagine, rooted
in our humanity but reaching toward the divinity that the Almighty promises
to those who keep to the path.

October 1, 2002:

We tend to think of climate as a given, something
fixed and unchanging except gradually over thousands or tens of thousands
of yearsuntil, of course, the invention of the SUV, which according
to the Greens has single-handedly warmed the world's oceans by, well,
by some amount that scientists can't quite agree on.

But enough about SUVs. Climate has changed, and changed both quickly
and abruptly in the recorded past. Brian Fagan's excellent The
Little Ice Age is part popular history, part popular climatology,
and overall a very intriguing read. The title refers to a volteface
in temperatures in Western Europe from 1300 to about 1850, during which
time the Thames froze over every winter. It was particularly cold from
1600 to 1800, and Fagan makes the case that much of European history during
that time was directly influenced by climate.

It was warmer earlier, warmer than even today. In 1000, the Vikings were
raising wine grapes in Greenland. In 1200, Norwich and Ely, now
landlocked, were both active English seaports. The oceans were higher
then, and we can assume that the ice caps were smaller, though there were
no satellite photos of arctic ice masses in 1200. But in 1300 everything
changed. The book is weaker on science than on history, but much depends
on flows of ocean currents called the Great Ocean Conveyor, which carries
heat from the tropics to cooler latitutdes. One portion of the Conveyor,
the Gulf Stream, keeps northern Europe much warmer than its fairly high
latitudes would suggest. If that system were to stop delivering its heat,
Europe and northern North America would be headed for the freezer in a
big hurry.

Fagan's book only touches on this mechanism, but a much more detailed description
is here,
written by the director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Key to
changes in the Conveyor appear to be the amount of fresh water joining the
ocean from the icecaps and rains. Too much fresh water, and the flows change.
We know this has happened at several periods in the past, including the
Little Ice Age, and an older, much deeper thousand-year ice age called the
Younger Dryas. WHOI's scientists think that if we melt too much fresh water
off the ice caps, we could drive ourselves into another ice age. The argument
is compellingbut y'know, I'll give up my SUV when the Greens embrace
nuclear energy as one way of reducing carbon in the atmosphere. In other
words, don't wait up for it.